I started hearing a lot about the add-on OQueue probably a month ago. If you aren’t familiar with this add-on, it allows you to join premade groups cross-realm for raids, PvP, dungeons, scenarios, world bosses–anything, really.

I held off downloading it. The truth was, I’d never had a super hard time finding a group. My main is a well-geared, Alliance character, and on a server where Alliance dominates (ratio of about 4:1, probably even more unbalanced now), that’s made it relatively simple.

Then I started playing my Horde warlock, and I felt the pain of that imbalance. It was nearly impossible to get a couple of gems cut, much less any kind of raid for Celestials or Ordos.

OQueue Fan

This being what it was, I decided to bite the bullet and try OQueue. I did a little reading about it, then downloaded it and tried it out. My poor warlock went from being stranded on a lifeless Horde-side realm to a Celestials Group and Ordos right after it.

This, I decided, was awesome. Suddenly, I had to try it for all of my characters. My main’s Flex night falls on an offnight, and since we’re limited to a night, we go for the most relevant Flex wing for the raid–right now, that’s wing 4, because we’re working on Garrosh and want people to see him (plus there’s some considerably nice gear off of those bosses that are still upgrades for raiders).

That meant I still needed the other wings of Flex–and I had OQueue. That was about 2 or 3 weeks ago. Since then, I have used OQueue to run the first three wings in Flex every week, Celestials and Ordos on my druid and warlock, and a few scenarios to cap my Valor Points.

It’s amazing–it’s nearly instant most of the time, and there’s no work involved–this can’t possibly have a downside, right?

All the Lonely People

This week, I did what I’d been doing the past couple of weeks: on Tuesday, as soon as realms came up, I OQ’d my druid for Ordos and Celestials. Within 20 minutes of logging in, both bosses were dead. Excellent.

Not sure what to do with myself, I OQ’d again for a flex raid, knocked a wing out, then hit up a couple of scenarios for VP.

Then I logged out, because I didn’t have anything else I needed to do on my main, and there was no one around anyway.

I’ve realized this week that I’m missing something in my OQueue shenanigans–people. I didn’t realize how valuable those moments getting a bunch of people on our realm together to do a world boss or teaming up with guildies were to me until I didn’t have them anymore.

Suddenly, doing groups isn’t about pulling people together–it’s like the entire World of Warcraft went LFR, and I don’t like that aspect nearly as much as I thought I would.

OQueue or NoQueue?

(Ha! NoQueue. Get it?). I’ll still use OQueue, it really is an invaluable resource when you want to kill a boss or do a scenario and there’s no one around to help you out. It’s awesome for Flex raids, which are hard to put together on a relatively low- to moderate-pop server.

However, I’ll keep my eyes open for chances to group with others from my server. Next Tuesday, before I open OQueue, I think I’ll take a look at Trade and do some old-fashioned group-finding.

Going to your realm first is great for as long as it works, but as more and more people just go on oQueue to get their world boss done Right This Second, there will be fewer and fewer people looking in trade and general for groups. I’m already seeing it, and it’s lame. “The whole world went LFR” is a great way to put it: tools that fill groups fast from a big pool with little effort and no need for a real community make content feel disposable. Not a fan! Perhaps once all servers have healthy populations from connected realms they’ll go back to making world bosses server-only, to help preserve that sense of a local community?

I’ve honestly been wondering if there’s going to come a point where Blizzard finds a way to break OQ. They’ve gone through a lot of work to try to get people out in the environment, exploring, teaming up. This seems to go against the core values of their game design.

I’ve always wondered what OQ was, I’ve seen a few ppl on my battletag broadcast that out. It does sound like a good tool but I can see that if everyone is using it, it would make the pool of ppl that are looking in /2 less to find.

I am so glad they have premade group system now, even though almost all of the groups are only about “frogs” “rep”, I sometimes will make a group like “cute boomie party?” and people did sign up! Even though not all of them are boomie, (some of the are hunters wanting to check a rare pet on my server) I was still able to meet a few boomies, and some other classes who use a toy to copy boomie image..